Four minutes of inane conversation that every parent in the audience should be able to appreciate.Four minutes of inane conversation that every parent in the audience should be able to appreciate." I laughed aloud. "That's very clever!" The Carpet Monster was something P'nyssa had dreamed up a long time ago when we'd first had Richard and Rainy. Richard had spilled a glass of juice on the floor, and P'nyssa had, on the spur of the moment, told him about The Carpet Monster, a creature that fed on food spilled on the floor. If you spilled food too often, she explained, the Carpet Monster would get big, and eventually it would be too big for just spilled food to satisfy it. Then it would come after little boys and girls, so you shouldn't spill stuff on the floor. Amazingly, it had worked with every one of our children, although Firin once admitted to me that his son had deliberately 'fed' his Carpet Monster because Uncia, being the biggest of the cat species, were supposed to be able to fight anything, even bogeymen, and Purrin wanted to get the 'challenge' of the Carpet Monster over with as soon as possible so he could head on to bigger and better things. I descended the gravtube to our bedroom. The beautiful yellow rosewood cabinets were there against the wall, each open and filled with reproductions of the books I had at home. Shakespeare, Halleck, Chaucer, the Bible, the Koran, the lleritik were all there. Copies of Gray's Anatomy and Mendelev's Treatise emphasized who else lived here. In fact, the bedroom was meant to reflect the triplicate nature of my life even more so than the bedroom at home did, where P'nyssa tended to dominate with her lace and decoration. |